Monday, 24 September 2012

I got sucked into a debate on
Youtube [i] a
few days ago. It disturbs me how people can claim holding scientific views and
still voice them in such an unscientific, obnoxious and downright vile manner.

I am not a scientist. But I respect
Science, am fascinated by it. I have an odd personality that seem to account
for that: I have a drive to understand the meaning, the underlying value of things. I am an “ INFP “according
to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator(MBTI), if you believe such things...

Anyway, I digress, here’s a memory
more to the point:

My biology teacher in secondary
school drove into us that the scientific method of inquiry is this:

1 1-You
observe a phenomenon, say life. You ask a question about it, say "how did it get here?"

2 2-You do your research, go deeper into what you are observing.

3 3-You postulate one or more hypotheses to explain what you are observing, say "evolution, creation"

6 6-If, and only if the results confirm your hypothesis, then that hypothesis becomes a scientific fact (and you can shout about it on the rooftops and expect receiving accolades from all over the world and maybe even a Nobel prize!)

5

This is of
course a simple outline. It doesn’t cover everything you have to do but these are the
crucial, basicstepsbefore you can
shout “Eureka!” and share your scientific breakthrough. That is why I respect true science. It supposes rigour, a sincere desire
to get to the truth and be able to demonstrate it to be so without a shadow of
a doubt.

Not a
single one out of the people I was debating with was familiar with this method
and blimey, it certainly showed in their comments. It was a plethora of verbal
abuse, bullying tactics only sprinkled with pseudo scientific thinking . The only valid
points that they made were the following:

When scientists use
the word “theory” as in the phrase “theory of evolution”, they mean the set of
principles on which Evolution is based. The phrase “theory of evolution” isn’t
a confession that it is an unproven idea. My mistake.

I also
learned that Michael Behe is a creationist. Therefore I was mistaken when I
thought “Here’s a chap that doesn’t believe in God but still points out the
pitfalls of evolution. Surely an evolutionist would consider his views at least worthy of
attention”. My bad.

But none of
my other arguments were countered rationally. Coming back to the scientific
method mentioned earlier, Evolution hasn’t completed all the steps. Nobody has
been able to recreate the evolution process in its entirety on a small scale in
laboratories (or any other scale for that matter). As far as I know,
scientists have only been able to recreate the “primordial soup”. No living thing has sprung from it. What
about the supposed “missing links” that seem to come to the rescue of Evolution
every now and then? They all turn out to be insufficient evidence after
reasonable scrutiny. So why is Evolution taught as a fact? What happened to the
remaining steps? Swept under the carpet? How is that scientific? One would argue that it is impossible to recreate something that has taken billions of years to happen. Well, surely having millions of scientists trying to help the process in their laboratories would cut this time short? Or more to the point, how do we KNOW that the process took billions of years? Carbon dating? Lately this process' reliability has been called into question.

Now, I said
it before and will say it again: I make no apology for believing in God. I have
my reasons albeit not measurable in test tubes; I have researched them, assessed them, re-assessed them in the
light of new insights and I still think that you can be scientifically minded
and believe in God. Believing in Evolution is not a guarantee that you have a
rational mind at all. Otherwise the individuals I debated with would have preferred reasoning
to the use of expletives and all manner of verbal abuse.

Conversely,
believing in Creation does not necessarily mean one is irrational. Otherwise
why would pillars in Science like Isaac Newton (he was a theologian as well as
a scientist) and Albert Einstein (author of the famous quote “God doesn’t play
dice” with the world) believe in God?

Here is the worst though: if Evolution has
not yet gone through all the steps of the scientific enquiry method and come out on top
with the facts and figures, the missing links, the experiments, peer reviews
etc, it is NOT an established fact. Saying it is does not MAKE IT science. Not
true science anyway. Not the sort one can entrust one’s lives with unreservedly.

I sincerely hope that science does not jump to conclusions like that in other fields like medicine...I reflect a bit more on faith in other posts. I wrote a series I called "Faith = credulity?", if you want to delve deeper on the subject.